British
Columbia’s advisory poll on
replacing its single-member system

In October 2018, electors in British
Columbia will receive postal ballots for an
advisory poll with two questions. The first
question will be:

Which system should British Columbia
use for provincial elections? (Vote for only one.)

- The
current First Past the Post voting system

- A
proportional representation voting system

The second question will be:

If British Columbia adopts a
proportional representation voting system, which
of the following voting systems do you prefer?

(Rank in order of preference. You may
choose to support one, two or all three of the
systems.)

- Dual
Member Proportional (DMP)

- Mixed
Member Proportional (MMP)

-
Rural-Urban Proportional (RUP)

Unlike the Province’s first poll on PR-STV as the
electoral system for its unicameral legislature,
in 2005, this third poll has no super-majority
hurdles to cross before it is officially regarded
as having provided a decisive answer to the
questions, as each question requires only a bare
majority for such an answer.

The answer to the second question
will be decided by a transferable vote system. The
2005 poll showed strong support for PR-STV, but it
was disregarded because it fell just short of the
two high hurdles imposed. A second poll in 2009
showed that support for PR-STV had fallen below a
bare majority, so it simply failed.

Unfortunately, this third poll,
instigated by the coalition government of the New
Democratic Party and the Greens Party, is a poll
where the first question has one defined
alternative - the existing plurality system in
single-member electoral districts - whereas the
other alternative is not predictable, as it
depends on which of the three alternative systems
in the second question achieves a majority after
transfer of preferences.

That asymmetry could deter some
voters that require an unmodified PR-STV system,
as the two earlier polls did offer, because each
of the three options in the second question
includes aspects that either modify the use of
PR-STV, such as the RUP option, or avoid it
altogether, as the DMP and MMP options do.

Many voters might take the view that
understanding the details of the three options is
too demanding, and thus reluctantly accept the
simpler, flawed, plurality system.

The RUP option is the closest to
PR-STV. With it, PR-STV would apply in all urban
areas, which include nearly all of the Province’s
voters. MMP would apply for the few voters in
vast, thinly-populated rural areas.

The MMP option is fairly conventional
MMP, which is a hybrid of single-member plurality
districts and an indirect closed
party list, so it is definitely not PR-STV.

The DMP option has never been used
for parliamentary elections anywhere in the world
and, having 2-member electoral districts, it would
normally only give, in terms of political stance,
either a winner-take-all result, or a stalemate. It is a
long way from PR-STV.

Victoria’s Local
Government Bill 2018

The PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania Branch
made two submissions to the
Government’s welcome invitation for online
comments on the above Bill.

Victoria’s Andrews Labor Government
introduced the Bill as a revision of Victoria’s
Local Government Act 1989, and as a
consolidation of that Act’s many subsequent
amendments. It was passed by the Legislative
Assembly, with a few amendments.

After the
amended Bill reached the Legislative Council,
debate was adjourned after the second reading
speech had been delivered by the Minister
representing the Minister for Local Government.
The Bill will thus lapse when the Legislative
Council expires before Victoria’s election in
November 2018. The Branch’s submissions covered
several parts of the Bill, which the Branch
President and Secretary expect to discuss when
they meet the Liberal Shadow Minister, David
Morris MLA, in October.

Casual
vacancies: One main
concern was the Bill’s proposal to replace the countback procedure
that Victoria has used for filling casual
vacancies since the Bracks ALP Government
introduced PR-STV for elections in all
multi-councillor wards in
2003.

That countback
procedure has been in force for filling casual
vacancies in Tasmania’s House of Assembly since
1918, and for Tasmania’s municipal elections
since the Groom Liberal Government introduced Hare-Clark PR-STV
for all of Tasmania’s municipal elections in
1993.

The 1992 advisory poll that resulted
in Hare-Clark PR-STV being introduced for the
elections for the Legislative Assembly of the Australian
Capital Territory included a
provision for Tasmanian-style countback.
Hare-Clark in the ACT was entrenched by a 1995
referendum.

Tasmania’s countback
is based on the rationale of filling the seat of a
vacating councillor by a re-examination of the
quota of votes that elected that vacating
councillor, and on no other votes.

The proposed replacement for that
sound and well-proven countback
is that the votes in the Droop near-quota
that were insufficient to elect a councillor be
added to the quota of votes that elected the
vacating councillor. Unfortunately that concept
departs from the fundamental rationale of countback,
which is to maintain the preferred choice of the
voters that elected the vacating councillor, and
of no other voters.

The submission by the
Victorian Electoral Commission agreed with that
concern. It noted that was also the view of the
Proportional Representation Society of Australia.

Until 1988,
elections to Singapore’s unicameral Parliament
were held entirely in single-member electoral
districts, using a plurality
(first-past-the-post) electoral system in which
the MP was directly elected, and was the candidate
that had gained the largest number of votes in
that district.

The
electoral districts in the small island State,
with just over 5 million inhabitants, were each
fairly similar in character, so its winner-take-all
system at most elections resulted in all of the
seats being won by a single political party, the
People’s Action Party, as it routinely gained a
plurality of the vote.

In 1998, the
law was changed to elect most of Singapore’s MPs
from multi-member electoral districts called group
representation constituencies. There are
now 16 of those, returning 74 of the 87 elected
MPs.

Candidates
must stand as a party group of between four and
six, or as a group, or groups, of independent
candidates. Most voters can thus only vote for a
group, and not for individual candidates, so most
of Singapore’s MPs, although popularly elected,
are no longer directly elected by the voters.

The
electoral system for those MPs is a pluralitywinner-take-all system,
like that used in 48 US States to elect a State’s
slate of electors to be the members of the
electoral college that elects the President and
the Vice-President.

The group
with the largest vote in the multi-member
Singapore constituency - even if that is not an
absolute majority of votes - wins all the seats in
that multi-member constituency.

There must
be at least one candidate in each group nomination
that is a member of a Malayan, Indian or other
minority community by descent, to ensure that some
MPs will be people from those communities, but
those candidates need not be nominated by those
communities, or even preferred by them to other
candidates.

That aspect
is akin to concepts for gender quotas in some
Australian party pre-selection rules for
particular single-member electorates, where a
candidate of the mandated gender must take
precedence over those not of that gender.

The only
majority community in Singapore is its community
of Chinese descent, but there is a considerable
number of minority communities.

Another
reason given for this type of winner-take-all
electoral system is that the larger electoral
districts used need far fewer changes in electoral
boundaries, which are relatively difficult with
Singapore’s great extent of public
housing in numerous
flats in large high-rise buildings.

The group
representation constituencies are not inherently
candidate-based, so they cannot result in the direct
election of
candidates. They are thus even less representative
than the multiple plurality system that was
used to elect Australian senators until 1919,
which was at least a system of direct election,
where voters were required to vote for individual
candidates.

This
undemocratic type of group nomination was
unfortunately introduced into Australia by
Victoria’s Bracks ALP Government when it provided
in
2001 for such a
system to elect Melbourne City Council’s Lord
Mayor and Deputy Lord Mayor jointly.

The centenary of transferable voting in
every
House of Representatives seat

The
transferable vote now used for every House of
Representatives seat became federal law only
when the original Commonwealth Electoral Act
1918 received
royal assent on 21 November 1918. Its
only opponent in the
Senate was its only Labor senator, Albert
Gardiner.

In his record 12-hour speech on 13 November 1918, only
two days after Armistice Day, he said the Bill should not have been introduced after the
Governor-General had issued the writs for the Corangamite
by-election.

The
impetus for the Bill was Labor’s victory in the
Swan
by-election, in WA,
the month before, with only 34.4% of the vote.
Labor would also have won Corangamite, in
Victoria, under the then plurality
system, but it
was won by one of the non-Labor candidates after
the transfer of preferences. The 100-year old
Act has had many changes since, and in its consolidated
form
remains the principal Act governing elections
for both federal houses.